The Canadian system is riddled with flaws and has been a joke since day one. Alert gets blasted out during a newscast? That's happened many times before, and leads me to believe that whoever is sending these child abduction alerts may be waiting to do so a couple of minutes past the top or bottom of the hour, so as to potentially take over during a newscast.

The people writing the alerts don't know how to write them with text-to-speech in mind. The TTS engine in those Sage ENDEC units (the blue boxes that actually output the alerts on each station) is far from perfect, but ultimately it's only as good as what it's fed. The website should have been spelled out as "amber alert dot O P P dot C A" (the spaces are very important) and 911 written as "nine one one" or "9 1 1". Given AlertReady is run by a broadcasting company, namely Pelmorex, you would think a broadcasting expert would consult with the relevant authorities and tell them how to do the alert messages correctly.

Another issue with AlertReady in general is that it's delivered exclusively over IP, and not the OTA system that the U.S. has been using for decades on radio and TV. If a station's Internet goes kaput and there's a severe storm brewing in the summer, the emergency alert won't be received or broadcast. That said, the OTA system isn't exactly feasible here, given there can be large swaths of the country that are a long way from a high-powered radio station, including full-time ND 50 kW blowtorches like CFZM 740, CBW 990, or CBK 540.

RA is correct in saying emergency alerts are mostly a good idea and that they need to work properly to actually work.

(EDIT to add that, because of today's alert transmission, Ontario might not be involved in the nationwide November tests this time around; the system is tested coast-to-coast every May, during Emergency Preparedness Week, and in November.)

Last edited by Forward Power (October 21, 2025 6:43 pm)

Aytononline wrote:

Here is one thing I don't understand, Canadian media has no shortage of good sounding voices. The CRTC should mandate that all radio and TV stations must have 1 person avaliable 24 hours a day to read breaking important information to us. The small stations like Blackburn and Bayshore could make a deal with Bell or Rogers for overnight hours.
This way we would have a audible voice that we can understand and it would sound professional and less like today.

You need one voice, not everyone doing their own reading of the same script. Mandating that everyone have 1 person around 24 hours a day is a huge unnecessary expense for no gain.

Aytononline wrote:

Here is one thing I don't understand, Canadian media has no shortage of good sounding voices. The CRTC should mandate that all radio and TV stations must have 1 person avaliable 24 hours a day to read breaking important information to us. The small stations like Blackburn and Bayshore could make a deal with Bell or Rogers for overnight hours.
This way we would have a audible voice that we can understand and it would sound professional and less like today.

We used to keep a few of them around the station back in the day. They worked out of a place we called “the newsroom”.